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Murphy posted about emailing from Finder a while back. This new screencast was entered in the Macinstruct tutorial contest, winner to be announced next week.
Just drag a file to a folder and it flies off to a pre-determined email address. Optionally, have the action prompt you for a subject so you can find it later.
Murphy finds this technique extremely useful for quickly backing up important files to a dummy Gmail account - especially with the new 20MB attachment size. You have files you can’t bring yourself to delete? Drag them to the folder and they’re on their way to a mail server, just in case you want them later. No addressing, no need to click send. It’s just sent. Murphy knows you can drag files to the Mail icon in the Dock. This is more direct - no extra clicks!
If you’ve got multiple assistants you send files to all the time you could create a folder for each. Dragging a file to their folder is like dragging it to their inbox.
The new screencast details both a Folder Action and an Automator solution. They achieve the same thing in terms of sending. The difference is that the Automator method leaves the file in its original location on your disk, which might be more convenient. But the Folder Action method can be utilized from an SSH session. That opens up a lot of possibilities and offers extra convenience.
The Automator solution comes from a post on TUAW that was inspired by a post on MacOSXHints that was submitted by Murphy. How’s that for a chain of events?
Visit the previous post to download the AppleScripts used in the screencast.
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Excel makes macro creation pretty easy with a capable recorder mechanism. You turn on the recorder, perform some activity in Excel, and the macro is written for you. This screencast was created on a Mac, but it wouldn’t be much different on a PC.
The main point of the screencast: How to use offsets to move the active cell around the worksheet. If you click on a bunch of cells while recording your macro the code will contain those exact cells. When you run the macro the same cells will be selected every time. Maybe that’s not what you want.
Example - what if the worksheet gets larger all the time, and you always want the macro performed on the last row? Or if you’re frequently manipulating cells to the right of the active cell? As long as your worksheet is laid out consistently macros can help.
In the screencast, Murphy starts by selecting an anchor cell at the top of a list and then using a keyboard shortcut to move to the bottom. The macro records the movement this way and always performs its actions at the bottom of the list. Murphy also shows how to move the cell pointer a certain number of cells left, right, up, or down from the current cell.
The bottom line: Using relative references in your macros allows the code to be effective as your spreadsheet grows. Combining relative references with an absolute starting point opens up a lot of possibilities.
PS: Voter turnout at the polls has been weak!!
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After watching the keynote it was obvious why the stock dipped Monday afternoon. There just wasn’t much there for Gene Munster and Shaw Wu to get excited about.
Murphy wrote up a little scorecard with his somewhat cynical take on how the presentation was interpreted by Wall Street types and nerds. Nerds being anyone who would actually watch the keynote in its entirety or read a full transcript on a site like Engadget, TUAW or Ars.
Scoring is simple. Major points of the keynote get a 1 or a -1. Or a neutral 0. Let’s look at the keynote:
Opening - The event opened with the PC guy dressed up like Steve Jobs. It was kind of like an opening for Monday Night Football. Terrell Owens and Nicollette Sheridan - that kind of stuff. Funny, but a non-event for our scoring.
Intel Guy - Paul Otellini came out and Steve gave him an ashtray or something. No scoring, non-event. The stock price reflects the success of the Intel transition.
EA and ID Games Guys - If there was anything in the entire presentation for Wall Street to get excited about, these kind of weird guys were it. There are games for the Mac - but bringing these guys in shows Apple might be getting more serious about the market. Murphy doesn’t play games, so he can’t really evaluate this one from the nerd viewpoint.
Wall Street: 1 Nerds: 0
T e n L e o p a r d F e a t u r e s
New Desktop - Good looking stuff. But not enough to excite a nerd. Most of the functionality is already there, it’s just not as pretty. Wall Street couldn’t care less.
Wall Street: 0 Nerds: 0
New Finder - Some great new search features. I’d almost take the nerd point away because the remote stuff requires .Mac. But being able to search all the Macs on your network at once is cool enough to get the point back. I just hope the Finder isn’t slow because it’s always looking for network computers.
Wall Street: 0 Nerds: 1
Quick Look - It’s a preview application. Yeah, it does more than previous preview applications. But it’s still just a preview application.
Wall Street: 0 Nerds: 0
64 Bit - Well, Murphy is a little jaded about this one. He thought he was getting into 64 bit computing when he bought his G5 (his first Mac) and Panther. And then again when he upgraded to Tiger and a Macbook Pro. Now they’re saying this is really 64 bit. What were we paying for before?
Wall Street: 0 Nerds: 0
Core Animation - Lots of potential there. This gets a nerd point just for the wow-factor of the demo. But it probably won’t work that way on your Macbook.
Wall Street: 0 Nerds: 1
Boot Camp - If we have to find something in Leopard for the suits to get excited about this might be it. There have been some great advances in how Mac users can access Windows. But the wow stuff isn’t coming from Apple. So no nerd point. Remember what the stock did when Boot Camp was announced? We’ll give the suits a point.
Wall Street: 1 Nerds: 0
Spaces and Dashboad - Move along, nothing to see here. Actually, the WebClip was kind of cool. It’s not a point though.
Wall Street: 0 Nerds: 0
iChat - If they had announced some new compatibility with other services we could give Wall Street a point. But they didn’t so we won’t. The backdrops thing is definitely cool. You have to wonder if it works as well as the demo did. We’ll give them the benefit of the doubt and throw the nerds a point. After all, they mentioned Star Wars. If we were giving half points Wall Street would get one. This thing will have mall rats dragging their parents into the Apple Store.
Wall Street: 0 Nerds: 1
Time Machine - Murphy’s a little bitter about this one too. If Apple realizes backup is important they shouldn’t have bundled their only backup tool into .Mac for all this time. Even Windows provides a free backup tool. Plus, we’re not sure backup is the kind of thing that needs a smoke and mirrors front end. It’s a complex task when you do it right. When Murphy is freaked out about losing important files he doesn’t want to have to zoom through outer space to get them back. Told you it was cynical.
Wall Street: 0 Nerds: 0
One more thing - You can’t use “One more thing…” for something this lame. It’s for stuff like a Bluetooth Wifi Nano or a small form-factor MBP. Safari on Windows is the kind of thing Wall Street might misinterpret as something good. But Safari on Windows doesn’t mean much to Murph. And it definitely doesn’t mean “One more thing.” They lose a point with the nerds for that abuse.
Wall Street: 0 Nerds: -1
One last thing - Abusing this is even worse than abusing “One more thing.” But that’s exactly what The Steve did. It sounded like there might be an SDK for iPhone developers. It was almost patronizing to hear the developers told they wouldn’t even need an SDK, because they could have their Web 2.0 apps ready for launch on June 29. Boo. This is disappointing to say the least. But hopefully it’s not the final answer.
Wall Street: 0 Nerds: -1
Apple Store Closed - When the store closed lots of people probably anticipated some new products. Something other than a new Safari. Even if it does run on Windows now. But there was no new gadget, no new iMac, no nothing. Ouch.
Wall Street: -1 Nerds: -1
Rumors - Google and .Mac were the talk last week. Murphy still hopes it will happen. But the lack of iLife news goes hand in hand with no .Mac news - and hence no Google news. No Hollywood studio news either. There’s still hope though. This could be some good stuff.
Wall Street: -1 Nerds: 0
And that’s about it. When you total up the numbers here’s what you get:
Wall Street: 0 Nerds: 0
Results like that will knock four bucks and some change off your stock price. But it doesn’t mean much does it? It might dip this week. But the iPhone hype will get that $4.30 back - and then some - before June 29. Murphy’s quite certain.
There wasn’t any bad news. Maybe there’s bad news out there, like a dip in iPod sales. Maybe there isn’t. But there’s tons to look forward to: New iMac. Leopard. Maybe a new MBP. Adobe driving Mac sales. Switchers driving Mac sales. More Google collaboration. Widescreen iPod. Back to school. And the iPhone!
So maybe it wasn’t the keynote you hoped for. WWDS isn’t really the forum for sales figures and partnership announcments - which is the kind of thing The Street likes to see. All things considered, this keynote did about as well as a WWDC keynote can be expected to do. Wall Street likes it when Apple announces new hardware and new content deals. New alliances, new friends. Not when they meet with application developers about a product that’s late shipping.
So don’t despair - surely there’s good stuff coming.
(This blogger owns Apple stock.)
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Skip on down to the screencast if you want to see some of the new Safari features.
In case you haven’t heard: the browser-builders have been busy. Safari 3 is in beta and it runs on Windows too. Netscape recently released a browser. Which one are you going to use?
Murphy uses Firefox and Safari. It’s one way to keep two Google accounts logged in simultaneously, although there’s apparently another way.
Using a Safari Auto-Click bookmark Murphy can load tabs for the blog, stats, ads, etc. Then he does his regular browsing with Firefox, mainly because there are so many add-ons to take advantage of. Of course, having two browsers open isn’t the best idea for conserving resources.
Safari loads very quickly, but Murphy prefers to the look of Firefox. Finding the right button is easier for aging eyes with a splash of color. Having the bookmarks sync from one machine to another is another nice feature. You could get the sync functionality on Safari with .Mac - but Murph isn’t a subscriber.
What about the new Safari?
Murphy loves the new find feature. The old one was somewhat lame. If you typed your search and hit Return the Find box closed and you had to Command+F again to get it back. This doesn’t happen with the new Find, which also has some slick eye-candy graphics which actually make it easier to view the results.
Moving tabs around has been graphically enhanced as well. It looks like moving photos in iWeb.
There’s another new feature too - check out the screencast to see how to recover a window you didn’t mean to close.
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Murphy needs your help.
The tutorial contest entries have been posted on the Macinstruct web site. The judges decide on first through third place - but the fourth place prize is decided by you - it’s the People’s Choice Award.
You can see all the tutorials here. Some are screencasts, some are text and screenshots, some are something else. Murphy’s entries are remakes - with changes - to his posts on making a custom dmg and mailing files from Finder. We’ll post the revised versions here when the contest is over on June 19.
So - please visit Macinstruct and vote for the best tutorial. And make sure you take a close look at number 27 and number 28! Murphy’s lagging behind in the polls - maybe you can help. Some of the other entries are really good - so take a look!
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